On OpenGameArt 2 and FreeSound 2

This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :)

OpenGameArt 2 submission form

FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing!

FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash...

A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2:

FreeSound Bulk License Change

If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY.

I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011:

Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site

Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got any libre art sharing news to spread? Let us know in the comments!

BlendSwap Hacked

Time to swap... passwords

Oh my. Two weeks ago Librivox. Now Blendswap. Read the story here. See their twitter for live updates.

Remember to use strong !P4$$w0rd5%_.

Hm, OpenGameArt appears to be down, so it can't be hacked right now at least. :)

LibriVox Hacked

The public domain audibook project LibriVox got hacked (not the first time it seems). There was no open announcement yet [edit: here's the blog post] but as a forum user I received an email:

A hacker broke into the LibriVox forum and got access to our completedatabase including emails and encrypted passwords. We have locked them outof the system, and we’ve fixed the vandalism, but they still have ourdatabase.
In the interests of full disclosure, here is some extra information:(1) The database contained every piece of communications sent through theforum, including all private messages. This information is now in thepossession of the hacker.
(2) All forum passwords in the database are encrypted. However, if yourpassword was very simple, it will be trivial for the hacker to break theencryption using "brute-force" techniques. They will likely attempt exactlythis, so if you use the same password on any other Internet service, youshould immediately change your password at those services.
We are very sorry that this happened, and once this is sorted out as bestas it can be, we’ll be doing a more thorough security review.

Well, I'm glad they are open about this. A great time to update the passwords I use to more secure ones. :)

I would like to appeal to the community to look out for each other and report strange activities like spam posts or random content deletion to site admins, pointing out this recent hacking. Everybody who had a LibriVox account and used their password elsewhere should change it ASAP, especially if moderative or administrative accounts are involved!

... Let me just add a little bit of positive open content news though: I was looking for car blinker sounds, contacted three Freesound contributors and got permission from all of them to re-distribute under CC0, which I did on OpenGameArt. j1987 even added a "all my sounds are public domain" note. :)

Let pixel maps do the talking

New Pages of Adventure graphics.

OpenGameArt is looking for a hosting sponsor. The target is a dedicated server with following min. specs:

• Quad core, 64 bit CPU
• 4GB RAM
• 500GB hard drive space
• 1TB monthly transfer
• 1 gigabit connection
• 64-bit CentOS, RedHat or Fedora
• Root access and Autonomy

Libre Graphics Meeting 10-13 May 2011, Blendswap v3, OpenArt

I'm looking forward to the LGM this year. Bart, admin of OpenGameArt will talk about running libre graphics projects.

You can view previous year's talk videos here.

Version 3 of Blendswap is live! But the site has some server load problems.

OpenArt, Moosader's own take on game resource sharing has been updated and has content under CC0 and CC-BY v3 licenses. It received a visual update a while ago.

STK 0.7.1, CC to OF, SaRII 2.2.0,jCRPG, CC TXT, OSM and TitA

1. SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 released! [great changelog!]
2. Former CubeCreate lead dev will now work on OctaForge (so far #octaforge chat is the only piece of infrastructure)
3. Search and Rescue II has improved sound and uses OpenAL now
4. jClassicRPG's developer wrote short-term goals for the project (also forum registration now works)
5. Creative Commons licenses are now officially available in .txt format (for easy inclusion in Your Game Project)
6. Adam Drew of Red Hat will webcast about Linux/Open Source music production April 20
7. Steampunk MMO project Tempest in the Aether will have an OpenGameArt-featured art contest during Weekend of April 30th - a todo list will be released on April 20th

SDL job offer, open art funding opportunities, tiny java/Slick game competition...

SDL-makers Galaxy Gameworks are looking for a talented developer who would be interested in developing and maintaining SDL.

Pfunked might support artists starting their own funding campaigns for creating art for FLARE, as he did with Justin's. Here are some asset ideas.

Then there's the option to offer high-quality art for being 'funded into free' at OpenGameArt. The current target is $130 for this dwarf warrior.

I wish there were (more) open source projects at 8bitfunding, Kickstarter, Fundry and IndieGoGo. The only open source game dev projects I found are a flash game (successful), FAR Colony and an interactive fiction engine iphone port (successful). I'm sure not only full game projects could make use of these fundraising services but free content creators as well.

Slick contest - art by danc

Then there's a game competition by the Slick java game engine. Check the image above for rules and prizes.

That's about all I can find and think of right now. Got anything to add? :)

PS: do you use flattr? Then share your data for great justice! If you're not using it yet but are sharing content on the web, then start using it already! :D

PPS: Wesnoth is still offering $200 for a swamp sound loop.

FAR Colony Funding & Kambi Engine Donations (Is it possible to make money with open source games?)

The "Is it possible to make money" thread was revived recently. And then two projects I follow announced new funding-'features':

FAR Colony (First Autonomous Remote Colony) is "a game of exploration and space colonization being held in the 23th century". An 8 bit funding page was created [announcement] for it recently. The target is $800 in 109 days. A note at the bottom says:

Of course this project will continue to progress even if my goals aren't reached, it will be more slowly and limited without but will stay alive !

This makes me wonder: how to motivate donations towards open source games (besides making a good game ;) ).

Kambi (VRML) Engine has introduced a fundry.com page for project pledges, feature pledges and donations [announcement]. Fundry.com looks interesting and like an easy way to play the 'donation game', a concept I talked about long ago. Fundry currently accepts paypal only.

The only other open source game project to use fundry.com is the Construct SDK. Fundry has no API yet and writes "Contact us to let us know how you would use it." I think perhaps a Trac integration should be neat..

On a related note: sound specialists can earn $200 on this swamp sound task for Wesnoth.

Happy Aðfangadagskvöld!

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ):

Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress

OGA's presents

There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example.

Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared.

Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

Fantasy Portrait Marathon Update and Reddit Game Jam #4 in a few hours!

Justin added new possible targets to his freely-licensed fantasy portraits project for OSARE and OGA:

$1500

by December 28th

30 portraits

$2000

by December 28th

35 portraits

$3000

by December 28th

35 portraits + a full length instructional video showing the painting process for the collection

I sure hope we can arrange this gift of Justin's video to ourselves..
You can spread the word on fsdaily and reddit.

In other news: there's a 48h game jam STARTING TODAY! Here's the IRC channel, here are the rules. I recommend github and love2d!

Freely Licensed Fantasy Portraits Financing!

The style

Open-art artist Justin Nichol intends to create 30 freely licensed portraits (or more) in the style you see above. I support his Fantasy Portrait Marathon for 3 purposes:

1. Allow an open source enthusiast artist to continue his studies
2. Provide portraits for  the excellent slash-and-hack OSARE
3. Add a quality set of art to OpenGameArt for use in various games

The cash

$1500, Dec 28

The target

Targeted is a backing of $1500 until end of 2010. At time of posting, $580 (38.6%) have been already pledged (7 backers).

The artist

Other works by Justin

Justin Nichol is attending the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, Ca. He contributed art to PARPG and OGA. He has a portfolio.

The portraits

• GIMP will be used for drawing the portraits
• Backers will be able to determine the faces they pay for (check the right sidebar of the project page for details)
• The portraits will be CC-BY-SA/GPL dual-licensed for maximum copyleft compatibility

I can only say: invest in this one! And spread the word too, for example on reddit.

A little bit of everything

Long time no see!
Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet. That is all ;).

Games

CONS

CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog. I know I do.

Xenowar

Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet.

skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar.

Contests

SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec)

Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [Rules]

Assets

OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more and more topics. Hopefully one day they (the forums) will have a better usable design :) (this probably depends mostly on Drupal and Drupal extensions).

BlendSwap on the other hand is not getting that much attention as I imagined it would after finally introducing free licenses.

UFO:AI license statistics

UFO:AI wants to legalize it! They seek freely-licensed textures and images to replace their "license unknown" files. And they have statistics and graphs! Also their latest news cover changes to their level editor in screenshot form.

Engines

Burster is bringing Blender into the browser. Not stable.

jMonkeyEngine's team is working towards a visual SDK. They recently released alpha 3.

The developer 2D LWJGL engine Slick is making first Steps of porting to Android. Meanwhile the developer of Android platformer Replica Island blogs about development for that platform.

SDL Multi-touch, gestures and android port are some features added during Google Summer of Code. [source]

PixelLight [videos] is a new, LGPL3-licensed 3D engine on the block.

• In development since 2002 (released in August 2010)
• Runs on Windows and Linux, a prototype for mobile devices exists
• The free libraries ODE (physics) and OpenAL (sound) are supported

DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition

Squamulus in the forums has pointed us to the DigitalMan Open Source Game Competition, a competition for complete-ish open source games, wherein the winners get ported to their new all-encompassing content delivery/creation system WorldKi



Nominations started a week or so ago and so far they have 41 open source games nominated, which is quite a decent list in my opinion, you can view the full list here. Unfortunately, nominations close today (12pm CST) so this post might be a bit late if you want to nominate your own games..



Voting begins as soon as nominations close, so check back at their page if you want to be heard.



My thoughts on the competition:



It's definitely interesting to see another entry into the sparsely populated Open Source( Gluon[alpha], OpenCDS[dead], and to a lesser degree DJL[also dead]) /densely populated Proprietary (Steam, Desura, Impulse etc etc) game content delivery arena.



There's not a whole lot of info on WorldKi, it seems a very ambitious project that combines game distribution with game development, with monetization all along the way (eg. Middleware devs can sell their libraries, Artists their art, and finally devs their games). If FOSS game devs can pay the bills from foss games alone, we might see some real growth..



As for handing out porting as a prize? I'm not totally sure if that's the way to go about doing things, especially if no one has heard of the platform before. Mentioning the possible monetization through the platform might have made it a bit more appealing, but then again, such things also cause dispute.



OpenGameArt Weekly Competition




On another note, the OpenGameArt Friday Challenge got renamed to "Weekly Challenge" and still starts on Fridays but ends after ten days (Mondays) so on during the weekend there are two topics to contribute to. :) The challenge art submission count is now at 77 (17 new + 60 old).



The current theme is Public Treasure Hunt and involves scouting the web for public domain game resources and is due June 28th.

Free as in F..Dragon History.. and cyberpunk

Some of Dragon History's GPLv2-ed assets

You might remember this video-heavy post about Dragon History, a comical fantasy adventure game for ScummVM. I wanted to inform you that the game art, including music, graphics and text are all covered by the GPLv2. They can be downloaded here.

The game is originally written in Czech and properly translated to the Polish language. If you have the necessary language skills and want to make the game accessible to a wider audience, it would be great if you could work on cleaning up the English translation. The contact information of the maintainer is on his homepage. If you want to turn this into a team project, feel free to use FreeGameDev's general forum for a thread.


Speaking of free assets: The current OpenGameArt friday challenge is "Near Future" and I have no idea what to.. hm.. cyberpunk?

To the six finished challenges, 50 pieces of game art have been submitted. It's quite fun to follow new art and picking the best pieces, so don't let the submission forms discourage you from joining in. ;)


Oh, and speaking of cyberpunk, the quite awesome soundtrack to the hacker game Endgame: Singularity has been uploaded in .ogg and source form to OGA. And the minimal-graphics single-player HTML5 turn-based strategy game Evil Cult has a great feel to it when you play it while listening to that (kind of) music.


PS: Silly me forgot to include my source of information for the art licensing of Dragon History. It's email communication with the project maintainer. :)

OGA challenges and snippets of games news

What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist.

Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!

The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.

The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)

And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)


By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.

The TORCS fork racing sim Speed Dreams (new website) seeks dev/art help for finishing the 2.0 release. The impression I get from taking a look at their commit history is that the project seems to be developing at a steady pace.

I discovered Pac Defence recently. I love this genre, but prefer the non-abstract implementations (PacDef is abstract) and the kind where you can use your towers to build mazes (in PacDef you build along the path). Here's a gameplay video for you. If you know of any foss maze/non-abstract TD games, please let me know! :)

I saw a video of FlightGear's urban effect and it looks awesome! If you enjoy these kind of videos, I can only recommend subscribing to planetacancun2 (author of the video) via YouTube profile or feed.

Violetland was tweaked a little, it has improved GUI and new pick-ups: bombs, bullet boosts, some pills which I don't know the effect of and the player has a teleport ability.

Epiar, the foss space action/trading game that is not naev had a dev chat meeting for planning the next version and is now looking for new developers and art submissions.

It feels good to post without embedding YT videos for a change. :)

SuperTux 3D & Xdriller

youtube-dl: NPK4ZaWYkJU | tinyogg: EWuLa

SuperTux 3D is a 2½ years old idea that is now being turned into reality by using the 2D platformer SuperTux' style and assets and the Blender Game Engine (BGE).
 I think the assets work well in 3D space, but of course controls and camera movement are unpleasant yet.

youtube-dl: OdV9cqdy49s | tinyogg: SRqm9

Xdriller is a falling-cubes-style puzzle game with nice colorful visuals and happy music. I found the game on SF.net a while ago and recently got reminded of it when I saw this tux model on OG.

Speaking of Blender and asset sharing: Blendswap currently has a poll on what website feature to add next (right sidebar here) and I would like to encourage you all to vote for the 'licensing' option, as once clear licenses exist, it will be possible to determine what models can be used in fully free as in you-know-what games.

Pretty Warzone; What's to see in Linwarrior; Sauerbraten and content

Warzone 2100 has pretty new textures! Oh wait, didn't I report this more than one year ago? Well.. the release after the next is supposed to feature them, finally.. But I *do* have news to offer: Building models are being re-modeled and re-textured! Slightly related: There is a tutorial on making models and texturing them on their forums.

 Warzone 2100: re-worked buildings

Hmm... I wish there were "tower defense" maps for Warzone 2100... and that moving units wouldn't be such a torture.. Speaking of torture, do you wish you could test WZ with new textures but don't have the time to figure out how to get the svn version? Well, maybe the following showcase video of the textures in-game will ease your pain. ^^



LinWarrior3D 2009_11_08 r15 was released a while ago. As a lover of the game that served as inspiration for LinWarrior, I'm compelled to like it. After all: you can shoot (and destroy stuff even!), you can move torso and legs individually and you have a wingman.

On the other hand, there is no mission goal and the game lacks any mech customization. Also I really miss a "STOMP STOMP" sound.. As for the game's name: well, at least they don't call it "FreeMech". :)



There's quite a bunch of new content in Sauerbraten's subversion repository, taken from Quadropolis, their community content sharing web site. However, [Insert expressions of discontent about licensing choices of others here].



I am quite surprised how much new content Quadropolis is attracting. On the other hand a discussion was started on OpenGameArt's forums, discussing the additional hardships of creating free as in freedom art, which kind of explains it. On the other, other hand, OpenGameArt is doing not bad as well, it attracts contributors who would probably never find a fitting project for their art and keep their works on their hard drive until the next disk failure should have separated them. I wish that projects would start telling their contributors to upload their works straight to OGA though.

I also hope that the community content sites set up for SuperTuxKart, VDrift and WorldForge will help contributors as they are supposed to.